Not Museum Pieces, Yemeni Jews Do Their Best to Survive

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: January 3, 2001

SADA, Yemen—
Youssef Suleiman Habib is one of the last Jews in Yemen, a silversmith living in a village outside this town in the desert close to Saudi Arabia.

With cooling breezes wafting into his mud-brick home, and the muezzin's calls to prayer echoing from a nearby mosque, Mr. Habib, who is 29, talked about being a Jew in a Muslim country. The moment was not easy, coming at a time when tensions between Jews and Arabs are once again boiling into violence a thousand miles away in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Since the violence erupted, Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has offered to send Yemeni troops to any Arab country bordering Israel to take part in a jihad, or holy war.

After waves of emigration, only some 300 Jews are left in Yemen. Mr. Habib's village, three miles from the bazaar where he has his workshop, had two Jewish families until 1999: his, with nine members, and that of Yahya Saad al-Bouny, who ran a leatherwear shop. But Mr. al-Bouny was killed, and his family moved away. Asked if the murder was related to Mr. al-Bouny being a Jew, Mr. Habib replied: ''Only God knows.''

Elsewhere in Sada, villagers say Mr. al-Bouny's daughter married a Muslim and converted, then succumbed to her father's pleadings to return to Judaism. Villagers also say the angry husband shot his father-in-law; a trial is pending. The incident attracted visitors, and Mr. Habib entertained questions with an air of exhausted tolerance, as if irritated by any suggestion that he and his wife, their two boys and two girls, his parents and a widowed aunt, were museum pieces, rather than ordinary people doing their best to survive in a hard place.

So conversations with Mr. Habib and his 60-year-old father followed a routine. His father lay back, mostly silent, against cushions stacked along a wall, his legs stretched out on a fraying carpet.

Except for the two men's sidecurls, the setting was more Muslim than Jewish. The room's largest decoration, a portrait of President Saleh, dominated one wall, and waves of prayer rose up from the mosque.

Shaif al-Kutaibi, a longtime friend of Mr. Habib and a neighbor, dropped by and said: ''Youssef and I have known each other since childhood. He is a Jew, I am a Muslim, and so what? He treats me as a brother, I treat him as a brother. There are no differences. We are Yemenis, we live in Sada, and we are friends. That is our story.''

Histories of Yemen's Jews indicate things were rarely so simple. Most accounts trace their existence in Yemen for at least 2,500 years. But there were pogroms, and Jews were set apart by law. In 1792, senior Muslim clerics ordered synagogues destroyed. By decree, Jews had to announce themselves by their clothing, the men by their sidecurls. They were not allowed to bear arms, or wear jewelry. Excluded from other professions, the men became artisans specializing in silverware.

In 1947, during the war that led to the creation of Israel, 80 Jews were killed in Aden, and most of the Jewish shops in the city plundered. Between 1948 and 1951, 48,000 Yemeni Jews, about two-thirds of their community, were airlifted to Israel.

Little of this history emerged from Mr. Habib. Why had he stayed in Yemen, when most Jews had left? ''We are Yemenis first, Jews second, and this is our home.''

Wouldn't he like to live where Jews were not a tiny minority, perhaps in Israel? ''We live here peacefully with the Muslims, like brothers; where you are born, that is home.''

Do Muslims in Sada make negative remarks about Jews? ''Sometimes people do say abusive things, but I go to the sheik'' -- the tribal leader -- ''or to the police, and things improve.''

And what, to Mr. Habib, is at the heart of being a Jew? ''Reading the Torah, and keeping the Sabbath. Otherwise, nothing, nothing at all.''

Not long ago, Mr. Habib spent three months in a Hasidic Jewish community in Monsey, N.Y., where the group, called Satmars, teach Yiddish in their schools and discourage Yemeni Jews from immigrating to Israel. In Israel, the Satmars say, the Yemenis will be at risk of abandoning their religious traditions for the secular attractions of Israeli society.

So did Mr. Habib like America? ''I looked around, and I didn't much like it; it was too noisy, too full of people rushing here and there, hardly knowing where they are going,'' he said. ''So I say, 'America is for Americans.' My soul is here, in Yemen.''

Photo: Youssef Suleiman Habib, a silversmith, is a member of the last Jewish family in a village near Sada, Yemen, on the edge of the desert. Mr. Habib has been to the United States, which he found ''too noisy, too full of people rushing here and there.'' (John F. Burns/The New York Times) Map of Yemen highlighting Sada.